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Facebook jumps ahead of Myspace in Traffic (depending on who you believe)

This really isn’t a question of Facebook vs. MySpace. It’s a question of Alexa.com vs. Compete.com.

According to Alexa, Facebook jumped ahead of MySpace last week to technically take the #6 spot. While it hasn’t changed on the official Alexa Top 500, a close examination of the line graph comparison shows the too big dogs in social networking neck and neck on Novemeber 20 and 21. Facebook jumped ahead by a small margin after that.

Compete.com paints a completely different picture. Despite the slower updates, MySpace still have a huge lead lead in October, 2007. It shows MySpace at 65 million versus Facebook’s 24 million.

The trends over the last several months have shown both websites growing in traffic sporadically over the last year, but Facebook seems to be making bigger gains. That could change, as Facebook Beacon, their new user-data-driven advertising program, has drawn a tremendous amount of heat from users, critics, and watchdog groups since its launch this month.

This all brings up three questions:

1) Will the increase in revenue be sufficient to compensate for Facebook’s “loss of face”?

2) If Facebook succeeds, will MySpace follow with a similar ad platform of their own? (perhaps they’ve already starting it)

3) Who’s right, Compete.com or Alexa.com, and why is there such a discrepancy?

I think that as circulation for newspapers, the traffic rankings for the sites are the measures of success.Many businesses use them in reports and clips. Who should we believe with these rankings and why can’t they be made more universal?